Willing to bet the blind can legalize prostitution. Be the hero we need.
Supreme Court allows blind people to sue retailers if websites aren't accessible
191–200 of 620 posts
Re: Supreme Court allows blind people to sue retailers if websites aren't accessible
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's no way they don't wave that fee for blind customers.
Domino's wouldn't give Robles the online price according to other articles.
Did they really go through an expensive legal process defending themselves in court rather than discount a large pizza by 10%?
Re: Supreme Court allows blind people to sue retailers if websites aren't accessible
#193Small personal story: My father is an amazing salesman. He used to sell for Schwan's food in the 90's (those big yellow trucks that delivered frozen food to your door every 2 weeks). He had a blind couple (husband and wife) that were on one of his routes, and they bought a little bit of food every time he came by. But they could never read the menu, because Schwan's only had printed brochures. One day, he had me and…
Awesome story. Very touching.
Re: Supreme Court allows blind people to sue retailers if websites aren't accessible
#194Blind programmer here. Just a glimpse of my life. Blind people have to live in an environment where X% of web sites and programs are not accessible, where X varies somewhere from 20% (for web sites) to 50% (for desktop applications). That's just my approximation of the state of accessibility these days. Now imagine that you live in the world where you don't know which printer or wi-fi router to buy, since maybe half…
I'm not blind but I'm laughing from reading your annecdote because: I'm a developer with typical accessability requirements who has a similar experience ordering pizza online and winds up calling ;-)
Re: Supreme Court allows blind people to sue retailers if websites aren't accessible
#195Blind programmer here. Just a glimpse of my life. Blind people have to live in an environment where X% of web sites and programs are not accessible, where X varies somewhere from 20% (for web sites) to 50% (for desktop applications). That's just my approximation of the state of accessibility these days. Now imagine that you live in the world where you don't know which printer or wi-fi router to buy, since maybe half…
I don't know if this would even be possible but, since you're a programmer and all, it would be cool if you built a small webapp/task-based game for people who aren't vision-impaired to try to navigate and experience the frustrations you experience every day. A gallery full of mystery photos, random buttons that needed to be clicked a weirdly specific way or don't work at all.
We wrote a free screen reader simulator for this purpose (Chrome plugin):
https://silktide.com/resources/toolbar
It’s not a substitute for real-world testing, but it should help you appreciate the basics without having to learn a full screen reader.
We’re also working on some accessibility games right now (scores challenges for you to complete in a browser with a simulated disability), which sound a lot like what you’re suggesting.
Re: Supreme Court allows blind people to sue retailers if websites aren't accessible
#196Rather than crippling the rest of the world for the blind, why not improve the tools for them instead? Screen readers that are limited to structured inputs can't be the end-all final solution right? It would be shortsighted to set this tech in stone with legal precedents. Do we seriously want to require every blind person to be fluent in reading html/React as the default way to consume sites? We should be trying to i…
React/Vue/etc are all accessible. Almost all web technology that exists is accessible. The trouble is you can’t just do what you want, and you have to test it to ensure it’s accessible. Most companies put it to the bottom of the list or forget about it. It really isn’t that hard, no new tools are required, everything is already there: you just have to do it.
You are thinking of the most trivial of apps. For example I have worked on a web-based image editor that is practically impossible to make accessible to the blind. Not with current screen reader technology.
Another example is Reddit, where a good chunk of their content is just text memes overlaid on images. For compliance, would you force people to describe their images with an alt text before submission?
The better solution would be to do what Facebook does and have builtin tools that will annotate a OCR/description with ML or crowdsourcing. In an ideal world these tools would be available to everyone with no extra work.
Don't settle for making the blind wade through a pile of HTML and call that accessible. It would be a travesty if it became law to use alt tags, because that is so far from the best we can do. Don't lock the world into dead technologies.
Re: Supreme Court allows blind people to sue retailers if websites aren't accessible
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a fair point. Sounds like this can be resolved with a simple new rule: if you're blind, you can get online-only deals over the phone.
So now everyone can pretend to be blind to take advantage of online only deals on the phone?
I mean, they could already get the deals, by going online. I'm a little confused about what you see wrong with this scenario.
Re: Supreme Court allows blind people to sue retailers if websites aren't accessible
#198Blind programmer here. Just a glimpse of my life. Blind people have to live in an environment where X% of web sites and programs are not accessible, where X varies somewhere from 20% (for web sites) to 50% (for desktop applications). That's just my approximation of the state of accessibility these days. Now imagine that you live in the world where you don't know which printer or wi-fi router to buy, since maybe half…
Is there some kind of "Yelp for websites for blind people"? In other words, a web site for blind people that lets you know whether a given site works with your screen reader? It seems like it could be a big time saver.
I wanted to work on it, I even have a domain for it bought already, though other things in life, procrastination among them, stopped me for now. I will do it someday, though.
Re: Supreme Court allows blind people to sue retailers if websites aren't accessible
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
Curious, not trying to be a jerk. For something like ordering pizza (or even plane tickets), how much worse is calling to make the order as opposed to ordering online?
It depends. If I know I'll make an order only once, calling phone is probably easier. If that's a pizza, and say I have expectation that I might be ordering same pizza every week or every month, then ordering through website is easier, since you can save your credit card information there instead of repeating it on the phone every time. But even for one-time orders it is good to have an accessible site, since what I…
Thanks for the response.
Re: Supreme Court allows blind people to sue retailers if websites aren't accessible
#200I see a lot of negativity in the comments. I imagine much of that is gut reactions of web developers hearing they need to do more work. As a web developer that has had to pass an accessibility review from a person who is actually blind each release for the last two years, I can tell you it’s not that hard. Make sure you have a sensible tab order and labels on forms and you are 80% there. The hard issues are creating…
But the Domino's site didn't have "labels on forms," it was a whole goofy animated game where you'd drag ingredients on a pizza to order. There's no way to make that accessible without building a whole separate web app. You can argue that goofy animated games are a dumb way to run a pizza website, and I can agree with you, but we all know the web is full of that kind of thing which is now waiting to be a lawsuit magn…
I assume it's making REST calls behind the scenes. It's probably not too difficult to make a text based version of this system.